Additionally, I found your statement "most libertarians don't argue for no government intervention" to be apt. What I don't understand is what most libertarians DO argue for. I haven't yet found any group of half a dozen or more libertarians who have a common idea on this and are willing to stick to it for more than the time it takes for someone to point out the ways in which it doesn't work, or for someone to do a serious cost analysis.

RR, we've had this discussion at least twenty times. I don't need health care today. I feel great today. But tomorrow I might get meningitis, and the fact that I might would lead me, today, to act in bizarre and unproductive fashions (saving every possible penny rather than buying consumer goods, avoiding contact with other humans) if I didn't think that I could pay for meningitis treatment tomorrow. What I need today, therefore, is insurance.

In any case, if what you propose is to guarantee treatment (as opposed to insurance) for poor and sick people, you are proposing government-funded health insurance. This is what Medicaid is. If you like the idea of Medicaid for all, also known as "single payer", that's fine with me. I'm sure you would have many allies were you to propose replacing ObamaCare with single-payer insurance.

I find that in most discussions over these issues, people who don't like the ACA, or ObamaCare, or whatever you want to call it, display the ability to selectively forget things like the purpose of insurance, which on other occasions they understand perfectly well. It makes it very difficult to have a discussion.

I think I remember you criticizing me for using the term "ObamaCare." It took Republicans a weekend to come up with "TARP." The Democrats had, what, 11 months? And the best they could do is "Patient Protection and Affordable Care"?

That's an interesting way of saying "introduces a 40% private insurance tax." Not sure what good it does when it's causing companies like Microsoft to drop coverage.

"sets up a mandatory-unless-congress-blocks-it Medicare advisory panel for cutting costs"

Even the CBO has questioned whether this is actually possible. And yet the bill counts this is a cost cut even though the panel hasn't made any recommendations yet.

"saves $240 billion over 10 years. You can argue that those cuts aren't "real", but every argument I've seen so far that they aren't real has been empty trickery; read Austin Frakt or Ezra Klein for details"

So you accept the CBO estimate for savings but reject their concern that the cuts aren't real? Read the CBO report, upon which Frakt and Klein base their analysis, for details.

"I would argue that if you think this is politically possible, just going out and cutting Medicare with nothing in return for any constituency, you need to think very hard about who's living in a fantasy land."

I agree it won't happen but there is a chance now if Republicans are willing. They can repeal ObamaCare and keep the cuts. They won't but it is politically possible.

"Empirically, without government intervention, poor people and sick people can't get health insurance."

Strawman. Most libertarians don't argue for no government intervention.

"For me, universal health insurance is a moral imperative in any sufficiently wealthy country. People who disagree need to acknowledge at the start of the argument that they think poor and sick people just shouldn't be insured if they can't afford it, but in that case my argument with them really is going to centre on my belief that this is an immoral position."

That's a really odd moral position. You don't believe merely that health care is a moral imperative, something most people including myself would agree with. You believe health INSURANCE is? And not just health insurance for the poor and sick but UNIVERSAL health insurance? I guess we do have a difference of morals.

Nicely put MS. It so often happens that we get so deep into the fine points or lost in very broad philosophical/political arguments that we forget the basic facts on the ground.

I might add two points to your summation.

One is that to the extent that the uninsured get treated, we pay for it anyway. The idea behind the individual mandate is that many of the uninsured just choose not to buy it, but could afford it if obliged to, and that most could pay something. This extra money from the uninsured, payed into the system, will go a long way at least, toward paying for the care the uninsured currently get.

I would not like to live in a country that would tell the working poor or someone temporarily unemployed, "die, you irresponsible turd", but that is in fact the alternative.

One of the main problems with health care reform in the US is the fact that most people don't have big problems until they are safely tucked into the 55% of our system that is socialized, Medicare, and so don't realize how vulnerable they are.

My boss at a newspaper I worked for had been fired from an earlier job at a paper in a neighboring city. She had worked and been insured her entire adult life, and really had excellent health insurance at the time. Then she started having problems and her doctor suggested that it might be MS, and ran some tests. The next day she was talking to a friend at the paper, her boss, over lunch as she did every day, and mentioned her anxiety about her possible problem. Her boss and his family were quite good friends and had for instance eaten at her house on a number of occasions, the kids played together often, etc.

The boss, who I knew personally, having also worked at that paper, was a kind and decent man, but he knew that if he didn't tell the newspaper's owner of the possibility that the woman had a chronic and debilitating and expensive illness, that he would very likely lose his job. So he walked down the hall and told the owner, and the woman was fired the next day, losing both her job and her insurance just as she was waiting for the test results. In fact the test results were negative and she found another job quickly, but the alternative would have been a long and expensive legal battle with her employer while fighting a horrible disease, or to pay for her own care until she and her family were bankrupt, and then everybody else would pay, anyway.

This is just one example of the morally odious behavior that our current "market" forces decent people into. Betray a friend at the moment of her greatest need, or lose your own job, your and your family's insurance, possibly your house and the life you had worked for years to build.

James Madison would be glowing with pride.

At college a roommate came home with stomach pains, and asked me to take her to the hospital. We got there and she, almost delirious at this point was obliged to go talk to an admissions secretary who proceeded to grill her (I was sitting right there) about whether she had health insurance. This went on for at least 20 minutes until my friend passed out, and then the woman turned to me and started asking me questions for another five minutes. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole, repeated that I personally knew, as she had said many times, that her father worked for GM and that she was certainly insured, and pointed out that my friend had passed out and her lips were turning white and that she was going into shock.

The admissions lady, finally waved us away and told me to go find a room and wait for a doctor. Me. After a few minutes the doctor turned up and took one look at the girl and his hair stood on end and he started shouting for nurses and whatnot.

It turned out that my friend had an ectopic pregnancy and her fallopian tube had burst and she very nearly bled to death, while we were talking to the admissions lady. The doctor, who had not been busy, had not had a chance to talk to my friend while she was still conscious, and ended up having to cut her open from pubis to sternum and spent a hour rummaging around in her body cavity trying to find where all the blood was coming from. She, despite being on one of the best insurance plans out there, very nearly died, because some people don't have insurance. And this was a non-profit hospital in a small town, and the next closest hospital was more than 45 minutes away....

Now it may be that the admissions lady and the hospital administration were nasty evil sadistic people happy to let sick people who turn up die. But I doubt it.

This is what our current "market" buys us. Forcing decent people to do morally odious things on a daily basis.

ccusa, I'm sorry you've checked out on the health care debate, but my honest impression is that you don't enter that discussion with the basic acknowledgment of where things stand that's needed in order to discuss where things are going. The basic situation is that the all-private system is slowly failing and pushing more and more people into Medicaid or off the insurance rolls entirely. Meanwhile Medicaid and Medicare, which is essentially the government paying private insurers or private providers with few cost controls, will bankrupt the federal government within 3 decades unless the system is fixed. Finally, US care costs about twice as much as care in every other advanced economy, all of which insure all (or close to all) of their citizens.

ObamaCare gets close to universal care, cuts Medicare spending, cuts the distortionary tax exemption for top-end private insurance (ie reduces government subsidies for expensive private health plans), sets up a mandatory-unless-congress-blocks-it Medicare advisory panel for cutting costs, and saves $240 billion over 10 years. You can argue that those cuts aren't "real", but every argument I've seen so far that they aren't real has been empty trickery; read Austin Frakt or Ezra Klein for details. You can argue that we should be cutting Medicare first before extending universal insurance, but I would argue that if you think this is politically possible, just going out and cutting Medicare with nothing in return for any constituency, you need to think very hard about who's living in a fantasy land.

Finally, I'm not sure whether you subscribe to any of the dreamy libertarian fantasies about how universal access to health care could be provided without government intervention or by "freeing up the power of the free market" or whatever. That kind of stuff is kids dreaming of sugar plums. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Empirically, without government intervention, poor people and sick people can't get health insurance. Publicly provided services have to paid for with taxes. For me, universal health insurance is a moral imperative in any sufficiently wealthy country. People who disagree need to acknowledge at the start of the argument that they think poor and sick people just shouldn't be insured if they can't afford it, but in that case my argument with them really is going to centre on my belief that this is an immoral position.

The double space is practically dead already. Only old people cling to their CD's and double spacing. Double spacing is forbidden in journalism and law schools today. It's time you join us.

Here's another interesting spacing trend. The paragraph indent is falling out of favor. I attribute this to: 1. It was never a good idea in the first place, and 2. pressing tab on the internet doesn't indent.

Also, Google wants to eliminate the cap locks button. It's another remnant of the typewriter days. On their prototype netbooks, they've replaced it with, surprise, surprise, a search button.

RR, I do have to point out that your defense of the single space is that ultimately it effectively is the same as a double space. In a way the double space still and always will reign supreme, even if one day it's accomplished by only having to hit a key once, whether because computers can detect ends of sentences or because fonts give off strange illusions.

RR, that's a good theory, since when someone uses only a single space, I can tell something is wrong with what I'm reading but it usually takes me a second or two to figure out what the heck it is. That's consistent with the single space not being horribly wrong, as in the days of Courier, but still not fully right. Anyway I think the bigger point is that people who use single space should keep it under ground. Just do it and don't say anything, and bide your time.

Actually, my mistake. It's not because computers can detect the end of a sentence. I think the proportional fonts (e.g., Times New Roman) used by computers today make single spaces more appealing than when using monospace fonts (e.g., Courier). So in other words, monospace created the double space. Monospace was the only font available on typewriters and DOS. I remember double spacing in the DOS Wordperfect days. Sometime in the early 90's proportional fonts became popular on computers and double spacing became obsolete.

Ladies and gentlemen, just because you are too lazy to put two spaces between your sentences does not mean that it cannot be done. Furthermore, the two spaces are not just there for looks, they are present in order to make it easier to visually distinguish breaks between sentences from breaks between sentence fragments. One cannot just abandon such a central rule of the typewritten English language simply because one is too lazy to follow it! It might be slightly more work for you to enter the second space, but the trouble incurred by you a single time will pay itself back a hundredfold for all of the people who will have a slightly easier time reading your comment!

P.S.: Stephen Morris, there is a typo in your comment. You typed

> Example 1. (There were two spaces before that parenthesis.)
> Example 2. (There was one space before that parenthesis.)

when clearly what you meant to type was:

> Example 1. (There were two spaces before that parenthesis.)
> Example 2. (There was one space before that parenthesis.)

I want to know why Microsoft Word has allowed me to flout convention and generally embarrass myself by putting two spaces after a period for all this time. I thought it was the correct thing to do and I have never typed on a typewriter. Oh, the humanity.

@ccusa, according to Wikipedia, the space between sentences was traditionally slightly larger than the space between words but not twice as large. Typewriters had uniform spacing (monospace) which led to the practice of double spacing between sentences. Computers can detect the end of a sentence and insert a larger space when you press the space bar. Eventually, double spacing fell out of favor even when typing in monospace.